Terry Branstad

Terry Branstad (17 November 1946-) was Governor of Iowa (R) from 14 January 1983 to 15 January 1999 (succeeding Robert Ray and preceding Tom D. Vilsack) and from 14 January 2011 to 24 May 2017 (succeeding Chet Culver and preceding Kim Reynolds), as well as US Ambassador to China from 12 July 2017 (succeeding Max Baucus).

Biography
Terry Branstad was born in Leland, Iowa in 1946, the son of a Norwegian father and a Jewish mother; while he was raised Lutheran, he later converted to Catholicism. He served in the US Army from 1969 to 1971, serving as a military policeman at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Branstad went on to serve in the State House from 1973 to 1979, as Lieutenant Governor from 1979 to 1983, and as Governor from 1983 to 1999. He was elected Governor at 36, becoming the youngest governor in Iowa history, and he served four consecutive terms. In 1983, he vetoed a bill that would allow a state lottery, and he decreased unemployment from 8.5% to 2.5% and turned a $90 million budget deficit into a $900 million budget surplus from 1983 to 1999. From 2003 to 2009, he served as President of Des Moines University, but he returned to serving as Governor from 2011 to 2017. In 2017, he expanded gun rights in his state, enacted a stand-your-ground law, expanded the rights of citizens to sue if they believed that their Second Amendment rights were being infringed, and expanded the gun rights of minors. In 2016, he was chosen by Donald Trump to serve as ambassador to China, as he had been friends with President Xi Jinping since Xi and an agricultural delegation had visited Iowa in 1985.